1. Technical Field
The Disclosure relates generally to the creation and management of a private online social networking system and more specifically to the time released dispersal of pre-recorded social networking content wherein the user creates digital video and images directly from a smartphone, tablet, personal computer, or other capable computing device that is securely uploaded and automatically time released based on system generated future criterion.
2. Background
According to the Go-Gulf.com 2012 worldwide statistics: 80% of humans own a mobile phone, there are 91.4 million smartphones in the United States alone, out of the 5 billion mobile phones in the world, 1.08 billion are smartphones, and 9 out of 10 smartphone users use their phone on a daily basis. In Feb. 16, 2012 The Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) reported that consumers who are supplementing their digital photography with devices like smartphones and tablets and consider their smartphone to be their primary device for their photography needs has tripled in two years to 18 percent. Although consumers value the quality of digital cameras and camcorders, they do not want to miss out on great moments that are easily captured by smartphones and tablets and spontaneously shared.
The average user spends 128 minutes on their smartphone every day according to a survey conducted by European telecom 2 Jul. 2012. Checking social networks and camera usage (i.e. taking digital photos and recording digital videos) ranks among the top activities.
With the advancements in infrastructure and Internet coupled with the surge in global smartphone and tablet usage, access to social networks continually grow at a rapid pace spanning global demographics and socio economics.
Current social network systems lack real privacy and do not offer users the ability to securely store digital content. For example, once users upload photos to Facebook, it automatically becomes the property of Facebook and allows the social network to use all of the meta data associated with it, including location, places nearby, the date time and even who's in the photo. Among other things, the data is used to create user-targeted ads and sold to advertising companies. Content that is private to users such as a sentimental video recorded for a child or an image intended for a single end recipient becomes exposed and runs the risk of being leaked or compromised.
Current social network systems simply allow users to upload, disseminate, and share digital content such as video and images to friends/affiliates and the general public in the present state.
Various device vendors (i.e. Apple, Google) and third party providers allow users to automatically store and retrieve digital content directly from smartphone, tablets, and computing devices, however, these vendor and third party systems are limited to simplified storage and retrieval of digital content and do not offer intelligent methods such as time releasing the digital content for future events.
Current social network systems prohibit direct access to another user's social network content. Even in the event of a user's demise, only verified family members or affiliates can preserve and in some cases delete a dead user's social network content; ergo, dispersal of the dead user's digital content is not possible.
Collectively, these advancements in technology and voids in social network systems present a need for a simplified private online social network system and method that provides users the ability to pre-record digital video and images directly from a smartphone, tablet, personal computer, or other capable computing device and automatically time release it based on system generated future criterion.